


A Dream Controlled

by Gryphonrhi



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, challenges: X-Files Lyric Wheel, involuntary telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-02
Updated: 2010-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-07 16:31:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryphonrhi/pseuds/Gryphonrhi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would you think about, if your thoughts and mind were no longer your own? Mulder, sliding down the slope into madness and scrabbling for every inch he can keep above it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dream Controlled

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not my characters and no money made. Characters are the property of 1013 and Chris Carter; the story, however is mine. Spoilers for "Biogenesis," "Sixth Extinction," and "Amor Fati." Gorgeous poems provided by Rose Campion; the one used can be found below.  
> Rated: R for profanity and violence to the spirit.

He tries, hard, not to listen to the voices. Except for the times when he doesn't. At times, the voices are necessary company. Mulder thinks he would go mad without them, and yet he will certainly go mad with them, at this rate. They think he's mad already, obviously, or he wouldn't lie here in this uncomfortable strait-jacket -- _is there such a thing as a comfortable one?_ he wonders, only to feel that thought torn away from him, a leaf in floodwaters overflowing what little bank he can offer now.

Mad, though. The doctors and nurses think him mad, sedate him when his pulse hammers too high in self-defense. It's only trying to bury the voices under the pounding of his heart in his eardrums. The tactic doesn't work. Mulder still hears the voices: the nurse wondering about the medicine for the old woman two doors down; the orderly wondering, as she cleans up vomit, if her husband will also be sick tonight, puking from too much alcohol after she dodges his fist; the baby several floors down screaming his rage over a cold, wet ass; the odd, alien mind of the shapeshifter sitting watch outside his door to be sure that no one comes to see Mulder without being noticed and known.

Mulder hears all of them, and they are, oddly, company. While he can bear them, anyway. When he cannot, he shuts them out as best he can, but it takes an effort. Too much effort. Too hard to think rationally about problems then, to sort through his eidetic memory for other cases with similar features to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Too hard to keep his focus tight enough to put together a laboriously written and palmed message for a partner who doesn't entirely believe it anyway.

He tries anyway. Tries to remember cases of sudden autism, of epilepsy, of spontaneous telepathy. Tries to understand what's happened to him, whether it's some kind of odd evolution -- _what did they do to me? What did they implant in me, the way they put a chip in Scully? The Oil that dripped into me in Tunguska?_ (and his mind flashes back to frigid chicken wire pinning him to a metal table, to cold stone walls, to cockroaches in the water, to the scent of Krycek's leather jacket and the feel of Krycek's chest against Mulder's back in the bitter cold night, the feel of two arms around him as they never will be again, and the memory is gone again, ripped away) _One of the times when I lost hours between heading out on a tip and waking up on the side of the road or in a military holding cell? What's happening? And why? And who did it?_ \-- or triggered somehow, and if so, by whom.

The constant assault of other minds on his, though, makes it hard. Querulous complaints masking impossible pain, pain that flattens Mulder against his bed although the actual sufferer has long since grown inured and copes regardless. Careful cheer that covers, far too well, inner terror and suspicions of just what the test results will truly be. A small girl who wants, desperately, to run on the playground and cannot until the skin grafts have healed further; like all small children, she thinks that six weeks is an eternity. For her, and Mulder with her, it is. Scully's determined optimism that masks her fear that someone has done this to Mulder and she can't undo it, or, worse, (on the bad days) that it was always inevitable. That Mulder's sanity has never been other than precarious and he has, simply and inexorably, tumbled. Skinner's worry about Mulder's safety, even here, and frustration that there is nothing more he can do.

The Smoker came once. Sat there and smoked, irregardless of the 'Do Not Smoke' signs. Blew smoke over Mulder and never knew for sure that Mulder heard every word in his mind, every foul plan and speculation. So sure he was right. His arrogance and sly speculations were more foul than the smoke from his cheap Marleys and Mulder wished, not for the first time, that he could forget things more easily.

Mulder can see madness creeping towards him, slow and patient and stealthy as a lioness moving downwind of her prey. Some days, at least, it creeps. Other days, or hours, he feels himself sliding down the proverbial slippery slope towards it. _Slippery slope, sliding down polished steel towards the edge of the razor, and at the end, I'll be in two pieces, the madness on one side and what's left of me on the other, if there is anything--_ He yanks himself away from that line of speculation, and the crime scene images it pulls from his memory, with a physical effort. He ends up hitting his head on the bed rail and hopes, vainly, that it won't be noticed, won't bruise, won't be thought an attempt, even now, at suicide....

Against thoughts such as that, Mulder knows, his only defense is other people's thoughts. The only way to stay human is stay among humans, he thinks, and wonders if it's profound or only further proof that he's going mad at last. If he goes mad, he wonders, will he then be able to function despite the voices? Will he quit hearing them? Will he just not care? What else won't he care about? The idea of taking the skills he's learned, and the knowledge of police procedure and its limits, and going mad with them -- that frightens Mulder, badly, and tightens his grip on his sanity for the moment.

He'd make far too good an assassin, he knows, or serial killer, or... any of a number of crimes, he suspects. Madmen don't have limits. He needs his. He knows alarm systems, and the fine points of evading detection while committing murder, or kidnapping, or assault. He knows how to stalk without being charged, how to steal without being noticed. He's seen too many experts at work. And hiding bodies? That Mulder is an expert at, if you can learn from the experience of others. Mulder knows how to do just that. Locks don't stop him either, nor are other people's pockets a defense. Dating Phoebe Green was very definitely an experience, and not just in kinky sex.

Thoughts of Phoebe lead to fire, and to sex, and to porn. Mulder wrenches his mind away from them with an effort. It would be too humiliating to be found with a wet spot on the sheets, or cold sweat coating him and his heart pounding from a fire that exists only in memory.

Fire takes him to Scully's hair, to Melissa's, to her death and Krycek's insistence that he never killed Melissa. That Cardinale did, the same man who shot Skinner in the gut -- _and did it leave another scar in the middle of the ones he brought home from Vietnam? What a hell of a souvenir. Does Skinner still see ghosts? Will I be one? Am I a ghost already, trapped in this place and my own memories?_

That question is worse than most. With an almost physical effort, Mulder shunts the memories aside with the voices still pounding against his skull -- he feels them battering there, an arrhythmic beat that in time may become a white noise to soothe him. In the meantime, though, he is denied his own thoughts, lest they lead to further humiliation and restraint, and the thoughts of others, lest they lead to further madness and restraint.

In the end, he lies there, still on the bed, in the most comfortable position he can find although 'comfort' is only a small part of it. And lying there, he watches the sunlight move across the room. Fox Mulder soaks up the warmth like a plant, and watches the slow shift of shadows across the white acoustic tile. Watches the patterns form, shift, and vanish in the slow slide of the day, watches the thoughts of others slide against the carefully constructed mindlessness and vanish, watches the nurses' resignation as they see him sliding away from them.

What else can he do, though? There is, for once, no escape in running or basketball, in porn movies or internet surfing. He has never slept so much as to find that an easy escape, and his dreams are even worse than when he was profiling, unlikely though that would have seemed before. Mulder hides in his shell, and thinks nothing, even to himself, and waits out the endless hours.

He does not even dare hope for rescue, or healing, or release. Release might bring questions of 'into what?' and healing of 'what was wrong?' and rescue about 'from what?' He lies there, and listens helplessly to the night shift and waits for the sunrise and the slow, endless progress across the ceiling, and does not even contemplate the roots of the words to ponder the possible connections between 'solace' and 'solar.' That would require thinking. He thought too much; such men are found dangerous. Aren't they?

He simply waits, for another day, for something he dares not define or question. He waits and perhaps another day he will see the irony in his imprisonment in his own body and his entrapment by his own agile mind. For now, though, he is imprisoned by time, and by boredom, and by the horrible pendulum of sanity, swinging between the famine of his lack of thoughts, and the feast of everyone else's. There is no happy medium. There is no happiness anywhere, he thinks, in a hospital.

All there is, is time. And the sun. And him.

And he wonders, at times, about himself.  


_~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~_

_Comments, Commentary, &amp; Miscellanea:_

  
Superb set of poems provided by Rose Campion. This story was based on this one:

And the Days Are Not Full Enough  
Ezra Pound

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass.

Title from the following quote:

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. -- George Santayana 


End file.
